Richard Mabey

Healing force

A GOOD hobby flatters its practitioners by making them feel skilful. The best hobbies make them feel virtuous too, which is one reason why people get keen on ecological pastimes. Mixing a crafty compost from the kitchen waste, or locating a slightly edible mushroom in a suburban thicket, can burnish a green halo, and seem like striking a blow for global cooling or against genetic modification. That is ecology-lite, and for its British practitioners Richard Mabey is a bit of a guru. He calls his ecology “deep”, and writes about it elegantly.

Cruel nature does not reward its devotees. On finishing his valuable and curious “Flora Britannica”, Mr Mabey fell ill with the ultimate disorder of complicated societies, acute depression. He stared at the wall, unable to practise his recreation or his trade, to talk to a friend or pay a bill or manage his existence. He found himself in the hospital near Northampton where the marvellous and depressive rural poet John Clare was confined in the 1840s.

This little book tells how Mr Mabey (unlike poor Clare) came out of his depression. He fell in love, and his new love urged him again to look at and write about the green world. His home had gone, and he had to start all over again, making a living as a writer, a trade that he says is like being “alone in a room for a very long time, climbing without a rope.” Like Clare, he fashions his rope from observations of reality, exquisitely described.

Adversity only strengthened his refusal to understand what is meant by the “tragedy of the commons”. He even objects to his own temerity, in having owned and remodelled a neglected woodland that was the most precious of his lost possessions. His principle is resistance to “the modern world's project of appropriating and taming nature, of turning it into an object”. Yet he finds his new home where nature has been most thoroughly objectified by subsidised farming, the grain-and-beet land of East Anglia.

Even there he finds lingering plants and small deer, and birds whose miraculous migrations connect him to the Arctic, to Africa, and across time to the paintings that Europe's human discoverers left in caves. His private devotion is to swifts, those high-screeching insectivores that stop flying only to breed and fly again. “The birds don't give a fig about me or any of us,” he says in praise.

An American trip changes things. Mr Mabey finds suburbs cheek-by-jowl with landscapes that man has not created and is indifferent to; sheer wildness disorients him, even when deliberately restored. Back home, his glimpse of vastness “made me look at our own tamed acres with a new respect, and a willingness to suspend judgement about their domesticity.” He ventures on to East Anglia's vast, flat factory farms, and finds, as colossal machines trundle in the harvest, that the sky is crammed with multifarious birds.